The Final Week

So, I’ve finally reached the final week. While this isn’t the last deadline I’ll be working towards, this is the one where I’m trying to get as much done as possible in time for assessment. There are still a number of things that I want to be working on to polish the game after submission, but I’ve done what I can, and have lost a lot of sleep to get here. Anyway, prepare for bullet points, because this is the final lightning round. 

The Seventeenth Week

Being the penultimate week of the semester (and my final year of the course), this week has been pretty busy, to say the least. There were a lot of small things to do and a few big things, and it all added up to what can certainly be considered a fruitful week. It wasn’t all pleasant, but things have been falling into place, and the game’s feeling progressively more real by the day. Anyway, here’s another flurry of bullet points and screenshots for you. 

The Sixteenth Week

This week wasn’t exactly an exciting one, so please don’t get your hopes up too much. Most of the work I did was putting things together, implementing assets and tweaking values for mechanics to work properly. However, it’s now quite visually evident that the project is coming together, and while there’s still a lot more work to be done, the deadline is very much drawing near… Anyway, I hope you like bullet points. 

The Fifteenth Week

This was a week of both tedious nonsense and stimulating problem solving; of extreme unhappiness and strong satisfaction. Progress was made, though not as much as I’d hoped, and while I didn’t get to witness everything coming together properly, that sight is definitely on the horizon. I hope you like bullet points, because this one’s another post comprised of edited notes.

The Fourteenth Week

I’ll preface this week’s post with a reminder that I’ve switched to a format of editing the notes that I took throughout the week (as opposed to rewriting everything, as I did before), but it’s also worth noting that this week’s post begins with Sunday evening. This is because I uploaded last week’s post on Sunday afternoon and had some work in-mind for the evening. Anyway, without further ado, here’s how my week went (with some good bits and some dreadful bits): 

The Thirteenth Week

Since the Easter break will be over tomorrow and I’ll be entering the final four weeks of Year 3 before submission (which are probably going to be pretty intense), I’ll be making my last handful of weekly blog posts a bit less wordy. Rather than manually retyping everything I’ve done, this post and those that follow will be direct edits of the notes that I take to inform the posts each week. While this means that I’ll hopefully be able to get through the posts more quickly (and thus have more time to spend on other work), it also means that you can expect the writing to be a bit less Deanish (which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your preferences). So yeah, let the final sprint begin…

The Twelfth Week

When I went to the studio on Monday, I was feeling quite numb, tired and unhappy, and thus didn’t get anything done for a while. Speaking to Ella when she came in helped me to feel a fair bit better, but after lunch, I started feeling so unhappy that I headed home. Things were pretty rough, and although I won’t go into details, I will say that I was incapable of thinking straight or getting anything done for the rest of the day, and I ended up going to bed relatively early. In hindsight, this thankfully wasn’t indicative of how the entire remainder of the week would be.

The Eleventh Week

Having returned to Winchester, I went to the studio on Monday morning and continued my work from the prior week, thinking of and adding variables to the main script of the piano mechanic prototype. I was feeling quite unhappy, however, and was having a bit of a hard time thinking straight. I spoke to Sid and to James about how things were going, but while I was periodically returning to thinking about and adding variables, I proceeded to spent some time feeling generally tired and incapable of doing anything. I did get around to slowly programming some code for calculating the values of the piano mechanic’s core counter and the radial position of the Piano Man’s line, but I didn’t get a lot done, and didn’t really feel like staying in the studio for long. After I had my dinner, I spent the evening relaxing at a friend’s house, and thus didn’t get any more work done.

The Tenth Week

Since I was in Maidstone during this week, there wasn’t a lot of progress with the project, so expect a shorter post this time. I started the week with Monday dedicated to meeting with friends I hadn’t seen for months. This meant that a couple of friends came over to play some games in the morning, and then we went to town to spend most of the day talking to some other friends. I also spent a good while walking around and talking to a friend about my unhappiness after the get-together. While I’d planned on getting work done that evening, I started feeling extremely unhappy after I’d returned home, so I got nothing done before eventually heading to bed.

The Ninth Week

On Monday morning, I began the week by going to the studio (as per usual), feeling numb and very unhappy. I imported the wind environment files that George had sent the prior day, sizing and placing it around Gloria, but one of the files that he sent over was a .max file, unreadable by my laptop. George continued to send over various versions, but each one failed to import in some way. At this point, Sid came into the studio and spoke to me about what he was planning on working on. When he said that he’d be working on the ripple effect for instruments played in the overworld, we determined that I’d handle colouring them through code (when I get to that), though he’d see what he could do if I were to run into any issues. Then, George sent over a package for his scene for the wind area, and when I imported it, I saw that colliders had been placed as barriers on the sides of platforms, but the planks of bridges still had individual colliders. This wouldn’t work well with the movement system, so I asked George if he could handle the colliders differently, instead creating a separate mesh in 3ds Max. While programming code to gradually change the camera position, I started feeling incredibly unhappy, and I left the studio for the campus’ “quiet room”.